I'm trying to remember some of the classroom discussions I've had with students over the past few years. They have ranged from discussions about how I frequently write the wrong date on the board (and how maybe we are time travelling as a result of my mistake) to kids sharing about alchoholic parents to weekend plans to topic sentences and back to time travel. Recently my students have been bringing in current events articles to share during homeroom, so we talk about those. They also bring in cool vocabulary words to share: myriad, kaftan, septagenarian...
Most recently, many of our classroom discussions have been about the novel we are reading - "The Watsons Go To Birmingham - 1963" by Christopher Paul Curtis. This is the story of a family road trip and U.S. civil rights history - an African American family travels from Flint, Michigan to Birmingham, Alabama during the 1963 church bombings. I highly recommend reading this book - it is a great combo of fun and complex characters and history and ethics.
Now, it may not come as a surprise to many of you that my school is not too racially or ethnically diverse. There is one African American child in the whole school and she is in my class. She recently announced to the class, "please don't say thank goodness Dr. Martin Luther King Junior did what he did, otherwise I wouldn't be here. You don't know that. I might still be here. He's good, but I don't like everyone always calling attention to me every black history month or whenever we talk about racism." I was happy that she was willing to say that to the class. One girl responded by saying that they only said things like that because they loved her and would miss her if she wasn't here. Another one said that they didn't mean to annoy her, etc, etc. I told her that we can respect and honor that wish certainly and it is good to raise topics that we think of. And soon the then topic was dropped. However, I kept on thinking about it... How do I talk about race in the classroom? How do students talk about it? How should we be talking about it?
I actually have to write an essay on this very topic for tuesday's class. Actually, I have to finish it to give it to a peer reviewer on Sunday night. Here's the question:
"This essay asks you to discuss and define your view of how classroom dialogue (discussion, talk, debate, etc) can or cannot contribute to the development of students' understandings of racism, sexism, homophobia, ableness and other historical systems of domination."
It is a lot to think about and requires some autobiographical writing in there as well. So that's what I'll be thinking about... I might also want to write about talking with students about disability. This is also relevant to my class this year because we have several disabilities represented in the class. Plus, I once heard Adrienne Rich (the poet) talk about disability and our view of people with them... She illuminated the fact that we all have "disabilities" of some sort or other, you just have to widen your definition. Also, you need to think of whole people rather than their constraints, etc... But it still doesn't make all the kids flock to the other student with cerebral palsy every day at recess.
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